A cursor is a small picture that
represents the position of the mouse on a Windows screen. Because Microsoft Windows is a
graphic-oriented operating system, when it installs, it creates a set of
standard or regularly used icons. These can be seen by opening the Control Panel
window and double-clicking the Mouse icon. This opens the Mouse Properties
dialog box where you can click the Pointers tab to see a list of standard
cursors installed by Windows:

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET provides a rich collections of cursors you can
easily use in your application. You can apply them to any control as you wish.
To do this, access the properties of the control and open the Cursor field.
If those cursors are not enough, which is not unusual, you
have various options. You can use one of the many cursors installed by Visual Studio
.NETin Drive:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\Graphics\Cursors.

Practical Learning: Introducing Cursors

Start a new Windows Forms Application named Resources2

Change the Text property of the form to GDI+ Resources

On the Toolbox, click the ListBox control
and click the upper-left section of the form

Again, on the Toolbox, click the Panel control
and click the upper-right section of the form

Once again, on the Toolbox, click the TreeView control
and click the lower-left section of the form

On the Toolbox, click the RichTextBox control
and click the upper-right section of the form

Creating Cursors

To create and design your own cursor, you can use Visual
Studio .NET. To do this, on the main menu of Visual Studio, you can
click Project -> Add New Itemů Then, in the Add New Item dialog box, you
can select Cursor File, give it a name and click Open.

A cursor is a Windows file that has the extension .cur

Practical Learning: Creating a Cursor

To create a new cursor, on the main menu of Visual Studio .NET, click File ->
New -> File...

In the New File dialog box and in the Templates section, double- click Cursor
File

Use the Eraser tool to wipe the area of the new cursor image

On the Image Editor toolbar, click the Line tool . In the
Colors window, make sure the black color is selected

Draw a vertical line from the pixel on the 6th column and 2nd row from top

Draw a diagonal line at 45˚ from the top border of the new line to
the lower-right until the line is at 5 pixels from the right border of the
drawing area

Draw a horizontal line from the lower border of the dialog line to
half-left

Draw a diagonal line from the lower border of the vertical line to the
left border of the horizontal line:

Draw another diagonal line from the top corner of the current shape to the
intersection of horizontal and left diagonal line:

On the Image Editor toolbar, click Fill

In the Colors window, click the button with a pink monitor

In the drawing area, click the right triangle.

In the Colors window, click the white color

On the drawing area, click in the left triangle

To set the position of the cursor pointer, on the Image Editor toolbar,
click the Set Hot Spot Tool

Click the tip of the cursor at the intersection of vertical and the the
diagonal lines in the top-left section

To save the cursor, on the Standard toolbar, click the Save All button

Locate the Resources2\Bin folder and display it in the Save In combo box

Change the File Name to Push and press Enter

Using Cursors

There are two main ways you can use a cursor in your
application. The easiest cursors are listed in the Cursor field of the
Properties window for the control whose cursor you want to change. The available
cursors are:

You can select one of these cursors in the Properties window
and
assign it to a control. These cursors are defined in a class called Cursors.
This simple class mostly contains only a list of available cursors as
properties. All these cursors are represented as static properties.
Therefore, to use one of these cursors, call the name of the class, Cursors,
followed by the period operator, followed by the name of the cursor as it appears in the
above list.

Another technique consists of using a cursor not listed in the
Properties window. A cursor is based on the Cursor class. It provides
four constructors. One of them allows you to specify the path where the cursor
is located. This constructor has the following syntax:

Public Sub New(ByVal fileName As String)

The argument passed to this constructor is name or the location of
the cursor as a file. After calling this constructor to initialize a Cursor
variable, the cursor is ready. You can then use it as you see fit. For example,
you can assign it to the Cursor property of a control.

When the cursor of a control has been changed, the control
fires a CursorChanged event. This event is of type EventArgs.

If at any time you want to hide a cursor, you can call the Cursor::Hide()
method. Its syntax is:

Public Shared Sub Hide()

To display the cursor again, you can call the Cursor::Show()
method. Its syntax is:

Public Shared Sub Show()

Practical Learning: Using Cursors

Display the form. Click the control on the upper-left section of the form

In the Properties window, click the arrow of the combo box of the Cursor
field and select PanNorth